A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel
Page 18
At issue now is whether Mr. Bo went too far by cultivating support among senior military figures—especially his fellow princelings—for his controversial policies and for his elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee, which he coveted.
Mr. Bo lived in a military area, which he rarely left while in Chongqing, according to a city official who worked under him. In 2011, he poured about $500 million of public funds into developing a helicopter industry in Chongqing to meet the army needs.
Last November, he hosted military exercises in Chongqing, attended by Defense Minister Gen. Liang Guanglie, after which Mr. Bo staged one of his “red singing” performances for his guests, according to state media reports.
After the Wall Street Journal article was published, several Chinese-language newspapers in the US also reported that one of Bo’s friends in the military had supplied Bo with weapons and secretly helped him establish a private army. But the weapons that Bo had supposedly acquired were nowhere to be found.
I contacted two military experts who castigated the overseas media for trusting those insider stories and exaggerating Bo Xilai’s influence in the military and his military ambitions. Over the past three decades, the two experts said the Chinese Communist Party has gradually tightened its grip over the military through the rotation of senior military leaders, making it impossible for one military commander to cultivate support. And the military’s access to modern weaponry is limited by the tight control exercised over the General Equipment Department. Even if Bo enjoyed close ties with two princeling generals, his ability as the Chongqing party secretary to stage a coup would be very limited.
According to the experts, Chongqing is home to a big army garrison and a military engineering university where weapons are designed. Bo Xilai’s contacts with local and national military figures were nothing unusual. The experts did acknowledge that many in the military were pressured to pledge an oath of loyalty to the party and President Hu Jintao in May to ensure that army leaders fully supported the decision to oust Bo. A vice chairman of the Central Military Commission visited the Chengdu Military Region in April. He urged soldiers “not to listen to, believe, or spread any kind of political rumors, and to strictly guard against political liberalism” in an apparent attempt to prevent military personnel from reading the various corruption scandals relating to Bo and other senior leaders, and boost the army’s confidence in the party.
In addition to the subversion rumors, the state media and party insider leaks depicted Bo Xilai as a hypocrite. In a February speech, Bo was quoted as admonishing other officials with the following words:
What is a person’s true wealth? Is it money? Money ruined so many people. The true value is to do good things for the country and for ordinary people; your life will be noble and fulfilling.
Yet, he never practiced what he had preached, said an insider. Bo and his wife were greedy money grabbers. Over the past decade, his wife was involved in more than thirty commercial property development projects and received more than 1 billion yuan in commissions or “legal consultation fees”; in Dalian and Chongqing, Bo Xilai abused power by granting several government projects to his friends, including billionaire businessman Xu Ming. In addition, Bo encouraged the whole city to study Chairman Mao’s works and love the country by singing patriotic songs, but he sent his son to study political science at elite schools in the UK and US, with the majority of expenses paid for by Xu Ming.
It was interesting to notice that in March 2012, insiders disclosed that the amount of money the Bo family was said to have acquired was 100 million yuan. Barely a month later, it increased to 1 billion yuan. Some online reports even claimed 5 billion yuan (US $806 million).
On April 11, the US-based Bloomberg publicized the results of an investigation into the finances of Bo Xilai’s family members. The report indicated that his son from his first marriage and his elder brother helped manage companies with offshore registrations, from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, amassing a fortune of at least US $136 million. Bo Xilai’s relatives used multiple names, making it more difficult to track their titles and business dealings. Bloomberg said companies in Dalian and Chongqing, where Bo Xilai held office, were among the beneficiaries of their investments.
The Bloomberg article, which was widely quoted in China’s Weibo, gave the anti-Bo camp plenty of ammunition. However, they did not expect the article to spawn a series of reports in the Western media about how the families of other senior leaders, including Premier Wen Jiabao and former Politburo Standing Committee member Zeng Qinghong, are wealthy businesspeople and have profited handsomely from their family status.
These exposés made China’s top leaders, who all have family members and relatives engaging in questionable or illegal business deals, realize that no one would be absolutely safe if the Bo Xilai investigation was allowed to expand. Because Bo had been successfully barred from the Politburo Standing Committee, sources said his foes started to cool off with their attacks. In July and August, the party called for political stability within the party. The true intention was to protect its leaders’ vested interests.
Of all the Bo corruption-related gossip, the item that received the most attention was related to his womanizing. Boxun and a Hong Kong newspaper quoted an inside source as saying that actress Zhang Ziyi, the star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, allegedly had been investigated for a sex scandal linked with Bo. The source said the actress had agreed to sleep with Bo Xilai for 10 million yuan and they had at least ten encounters between 2004 and 2007. The report went on to say that Zhang was barred from leaving the country to participate in the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012, when her movie Dangerous Liaisons was competing. In response to such reports, Zhang, who claimed to have never met Bo Xilai, filed a lawsuit at the High Court of Hong Kong against Boxun and two publications in Hong Kong that carried the allegations. At the time of writing, no verdict has been reached and there has been no ban on Zhang’s travel.
As insiders were busy feeding the overseas media with their usual mixture of truth and lies about Bo Xilai, his legacy in Chongqing was being quietly washed away. The big banners bearing Communist slogans in public places were quickly replaced with Gucci and Radar watch ads. Police removed gigantic poster boards that advocated Bo’s signature “Five Chongqing” program—building a livable Chongqing through low-cost public housing, a traffic-friendly Chongqing through more infrastructure investment, a forested green Chongqing through environmental programs, a safe Chongqing by aggressive anticrime initiatives, and a healthy Chongqing through better delivery of health care. The Five Chongqing program, initiated a year after Bo Xilai came to the city, became a model for other cities to emulate. Bo’s replacement, who has ascended to the Politburo Standing Committee, overhauled the government finances and suspended many of Bo’s large-scale public projects.
By mid-May 2012, government officials who were detained, demoted, or resigned during Bo’s reign had submitted applications to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, seeking review of their cases, and many have gotten their jobs back. Currently, more than a dozen senior municipal officials favored by Bo have been placed under investigation or fired.
But the steady reversal of the Bo Xilai policies upset several Chongqing residents, especially after they heard rumors that the government was planning to pull out the expensive gingko trees that Bo had planted as part of his high-profile environmental programs. “Secretary Bo has done a lot for the city and his program has truly benefited ordinary folks,” said a volunteer staffing a traffic control booth on a busy street downtown in November 2012—he still referred to Bo by his former title of party secretary. “Everyone knows that the streets were safer when Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun were in power and the environment improved. We had more trees and the air was cleaner. We shouldn’t reverse everything he did, simply because he made some mistakes,” the volunteer added. And Bo Xilai’s followers in Dalian and Chongqing have remained pe
rsistent. On his birthday in July 2012, many anonymous “Happy Birthday, Secretary Bo” posters popped up in public places in the two cities.
The memory of Bo was not easy to erase.
PART III
Poisonous Water
The Chinese version of femme fatale is huo shui, which means “poisonous water.” Huo shui specifically refers to a beautiful woman who ruins the lives and careers of powerful men.
THE GIRL BUTCHER
FOR SIX WEEKS in October and November 1952, on a forested ridge near what would become the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, Chinese soldiers repelled repeated attacks by US-led UN and South Korean forces in what became known as the Battle of Shangganling, or the Battle of Triangle Hill to the US. General Gu Jingsheng, who had helped Mao Zedong found the People’s Republic of China, knew the position was strategically important and he led the tough defense that inflicted heavy casualties on American forces despite their superior artillery and aircraft. The battle was made into a movie, now regarded as a Communist propaganda classic. After the war, General Gu held various leadership positions in China’s air force and the defense department. He worked with Qian Xuesen, the father of rocketry, to develop China’s space and rocket programs and subsequently the country’s first atomic bomb.
Fan Chengxiu was the direct descendent of an illustrious eleventh-century writer, politician, and militarist, whose writings are still part of the Chinese high school curriculum. Fan joined Mao’s troops at the age of fourteen; she fought in the Resistance War against Japan in the late 1930s and the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s. When the revolution succeeded, Fan was appointed a leader of the Central Party School.
The revolutionary Fan married General Gu in the 1940s and gave birth to five daughters. The youngest was Gu Kailai, who would marry Bo Xilai.
Neighbors called the five Gu girls “Five Golden Flowers,” the title of a popular 1950s musical featuring the love stories of five beautiful, strong-willed young Chinese women. The Gu sisters possessed not only good looks but also business acumen. Three of them operate business ventures worth a cumulative US $1 billion.
Despite her parents’ extraordinary past, Gu Kailai grew up in a family rocked by political upheavals. The year she was born, her mother was labeled a rightist and a counterrevolutionary for defending a young staff member who had dared criticize the party’s policies. Following her mother’s detention, the local party organization demanded she file for divorce to protect the political career of General Gu, who was a crucial figure in developing the country’s national defense industry. Forced to choose between his career and his family, General Gu picked the latter and asked his wife to ignore the party’s demand. “I understand Fan Chengxiu very well,” General Gu wrote. “She joined the party at the age of fifteen and studied Marxism at the party school. She repeatedly risked her life for the party during the war years. She has been loyal and given her whole life to the party. Calling her a counterrevolutionary is the biggest injustice under heaven. Divorcing her would ruin her life. I will not do it. The party can do whatever they want with me.”
General Gu paid dearly for his defiance. He was sidelined and barred from participating in important defense projects. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution started, General Gu and his wife were separated and imprisoned for twelve years, during which time they had no contact with their children. Gu Kailai and her sisters lived like orphans. In a letter to his daughters, General Gu offered a glimpse of their lives in that period:
You should not have second thoughts about the party, just because your mother and I are being paraded around for public denunciation every day and our homes are being raided every couple of days. I know that Zheng Xie [the second daughter] has been disqualified from joining the Red Guard organization. Don’t be angry. If you are a true revolutionary, you should carve out your own path. The younger girls should manage to finish school. Practice your calligraphy at home and learn to protect each other. Don’t be scared of knocks on the door and raids at midnight. Stay away from the bullies among other children in the neighborhood.
At the age of thirteen, Gu Kailai graduated from junior high school. Although her four siblings had been sent to remote rural areas for what was then called reeducation, she was spared the harsh treatment. The local government assigned her a job in the city with a construction firm. Gu Kailai became a bricklayer first and was subsequently transferred to a state-run meat store, where she became a model female butcher. One of Gu Kailai’s friends told the Chinese media she looked tiny for her age, but she was tough and dedicated. She established a reputation as the woman with a “single cleaver cut”—with one strike of the cleaver, she could give customers the exact amount of pork they requested.
In her spare time, Gu Kailai picked up the pipa, a traditional pear-shaped Chinese musical instrument, hoping that she could improve her career and become a professional musician. She was a fast and diligent learner. Within a short time, she could play like a professional. Indeed, in 1976, she joined the orchestra at the Beijing Film Studio as a pipa soloist and was selected to play the theme music for the documentary The Passing of Chairman Mao.
After Mao’s death, her parents were released from jail and the family became whole again. With the return of the national college entrance examination system, Gu Kailai set her sights on college, but having quit school in her early teens, she had never received training in mathematics and scored a near zero in that examination. Fortunately, she performed well in her social science subjects, especially her Chinese calligraphy, and in the fall of 1978, Gu, then age twenty, was enrolled at Beijing University, one of the oldest and most prestigious academic institutions in China. She pursued a bachelor’s degree in law and a master’s degree in political science. Bo’s first wife, Li Danyu, told the New York Times in October 2012 that Gu’s admission to Beijing University was rejected initially and that the Bo family helped her get in through their connections at the request of Gu’s mother.
At the university, Gu Kailai found herself a member of the much-admired princelings group on campus. Her talent, good looks, and family background soon made her popular among boys. In the late 1970s, dance parties were held every weekend at Beijing University and Gu Kailai was said to be a regular. She met a tall and handsome but quiet young man at one of the parties and fell deeply in love. The young man’s father was a military commander and a friend of General Gu’s. In her second year, Gu Kailai and her boyfriend became inseparable, and soon she became pregnant. In the late 1970s, premarital sex was considered a serious moral and political offense. If found out, Gu Kailai and her boyfriend would face expulsion. The boy became scared and disappeared for several weeks. His cowardice and indifference devastated Gu Kailai. With the help of his sisters, she reportedly procured an abortion and dumped her boyfriend. A classmate remembered her as a tough, unconventional woman.
In 1984, during a field trip with a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Gu Kailai told the state media that she had become acquainted with Bo Xilai and was starstruck. Li Danyu, Bo’s first wife, claimed that Bo and Gu were good friends while they were at Beijing University—both were regulars at student dance parties. In a profile in the Singapore-based United Morning News, Gu compared the young party chief to her father—“educated, idealistic, and reliable,” like “those heroes in movies.” Bo and Gu also bonded over their shared experiences: both their parents had come from Shanxi province where they joined Mao’s revolution, and were later persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. While Gu Kailai and her sisters had grown up in prison with her mother, Bo Xilai and his siblings were left to wander the streets when their father was detained and their mother died in the hands of the Red Guards.
The relationship soon blossomed, even though Bo Xilai had to maneuver through his messy divorce. In 1986, Gu Kailai gave up an opportunity to study in the US and married Bo Xilai, who was nine years older. The next year, their son, Bo Guagua, was born.
At the end of 1987, she passed t
he newly installed National Lawyer’s Examination, an equivalent to the American bar examination, and became one of the earliest licensed attorneys in China. In 1988, after Bo Xilai moved to Dalian to take up a district party secretary’s job, she followed him and set up the Kailai Law Firm in the city. She was one of the first lawyers in China to start a private practice under her own name. As her husband rose through the ranks, Gu Kailai’s practice flourished. In 1995, she established a branch office in Beijing.
In her short career as a lawyer, two high-profile cases boosted her reputation. In 1997, she represented a Chinese manufacturer of laundry detergent, which had purchased a computerized assembly line from a machinery company in the US in 1987. The US company filed for bankruptcy before it transferred any of the main software or operating instructions. The equipment that had arrived was useless and the Chinese manufacturer lost US $5 million. When it attempted to retrieve the relevant technology needed to run the equipment, a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee sued the Chinese for stealing trade secrets and for intellectual property infringement. The court entered a default judgment, ordering the Chinese company to pay US $1.4 million in damages. Because the Chinese company was a state-owned enterprise, the federal court in Alabama notified the Chinese Foreign Ministry in 1996, threatening to freeze the assets of Chinese state companies operating in the US if the government refused to pay. The latter part of the court order triggered a strong response from the Chinese government. According to an official Chinese media report, Gu Kailai agreed to take on the case pro bono. She flew to Alabama and hired a legal team to argue the case. In March 1997, a federal appeals court in Alabama overturned the verdict.
In the mid-1990s, Sino–US business disputes were relatively rare and there was little by way of precedent. The case made Gu famous. The Chinese public saw her as a hero who had dared to stand up to American bullying to protect the interests of Chinese enterprises. Based on the experience, Gu Kailai wrote a book, Winning a Lawsuit in America, which became a best seller. However, some critics later accused Gu Kailai of exaggerating her role in the case. On August 14, 2012, the Hong Kong–based New Century Magazine released an article that pointed out Gu Kailai had no license to represent clients in court and that her role was limited to advising American counsel and monitoring the court proceedings. Besides, China did not really win the lawsuit, because the Chinese company never recouped the US $5 million loss from the US equipment manufacturer.